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The Core

Out of the Rut and Into the Groove"The Core"

The core curriculum in the Alda Medical Experience™ specifically targets health care team communication (i.e., communication among physicians, nurses, ancillary staff). The National Academy of Medicine outlines “the ability to work in interdisciplinary teams” as one of five core competencies that all health care professionals should be able to demonstrate. This module delivers effective communication skills for health care teams. Health care team members across disciplines often feel overworked and undervalued, leading to increased stress and eventual burnout. This phenomenon is becoming more common as the structure of the health care delivery system shifts to team-based models where a range of health care team members with different skill sets and experience levels must work together to deliver care.

This module reintroduces humanism into health care delivery, helps all team members connect to their passion for their work, and helps them hone their communication skills to communicate clearly and efficiently with other team members. Out of the Rut and Into the Groove is ideally suited for physicians, nurses, ancillary staff, and trainees.

What to Expect:

A series of improvisation exercises lays the foundation for empathic communication among health care team members. Health care professionals across the care continuum gain clarity on their own communication style and work together to create strategies for enhanced collaboration. A debrief and application to health care communication solidifies the learning experience. Participants are introduced to the Initiating Challenging Conversations Tool, designed to foster direct, transparent, and empathic communication among colleagues engaged in what they perceive to be a challenging conversation. The tool provides a strategy to recall objective facts, acknowledge different interpretations of those facts, and apply concepts from the improvisation exercises to outline a clear strategy for implementation in the workplace.

The duration of this module is 3 hours. Sessions accommodate groups up to 16 or groups up to 32.